Recruiting In The Cloud

Hi Eric here,

Time for a big sweeping statement – The Cloud has changed everything!

Huge Change

There I said it, cloud computing has brought about massive change in the way we do business. It’s provided competitive advantage for smaller companies and huge economies of scale across the entire range of business sizes. The ability for a three person company to have access to the same functionality as a company with 3,000 staff is indeed a revelation.

This has allowed smaller companies to plug into advanced software infrastructures (for example Sales Force) and to have powerful tracking and reporting that would only have been a pipe dream just a few years ago.

And, whilst that is brilliant for small and medium enterprise, there has been an unexpetced side effect of development environments such as SaaS and PaaS.

Development Environment

These tools provide a powerful development environment and the ability to build cloud apps quickly and efficiently. And, as you can imagine there is no shortage of ideas for new applications. After all oif this same competitve advantage can be delivered in to new applications areas there is money to be made.

And, therein lies “the rub”, this has lead to the rise and in some cases, very quick fall of a number of cloud based application companies.

Different Skills

This has made recruiting in this sub set of the niche extremely difficult and a highly skilled process that demands a skillset somewhat out of the norm for the recruitment industry. The difrference is that, when most people move into a permanent job, they are looking to stay for a number of years. If a company trying to build a new app runs out of investement funds, they are very likely to collapse, and this happens with monotonous regularity in this market.

That means suddenly a lot of highly skilled SaaS developers could suddenly be in the market for work.

Now, I know you could use contract staff and they would be more used to a sudden “out of work” situation, but, bosses want longevity and to know their development team are secdure.

This ebb and flow is much more pronounced in this market so, as I said, special skills are needed.

Unique Market

“We specialise in this pre IPO and Venture funded sector of the cloud app market, so we know what goes on…how it works”, he explains, “we know companies come and go, sometimes very quickly, and we have to be prepared toi move both our clients and candidates on very quickly. We have to understand all of the development projects, their status as well as knowing where the pockets of demand for skills are”.

“It is such a fluid situation and one that requires rapid reaction times, we find we simply have to be far more pro-active than a normal recruiter would be in order to maximise our revenue from the market. Professional Services Recuitment in Cloud Services is a tough ask, and it requires very specific skills. We have to be extremely diligent in our own recruitment. We need to have our finger on the pulse and be able to react. Understanding the market and the n being able to call people in disrtressed situations and make something happen out of nothing is a key skill for our recruiters”.

Reaction Time

“In a normal recruitment situation it is nowhere near as mission critical to move quickly in most instances. I have found that highly skilled people do not like being idle. But it also takes a “certain type” of ceveloper to enjoy the cut and thrust and indeed uncertainty that is inherent in this sort of cloud applications environment. Some people need stability to thrive. However, we have earned our reputation by being able to react quickly to urgent situations and indeed in many instances to pre-empt them. You see, being pro-0active is where we win in most cases. Other recruitment agencies just do not have the market knowledge, database and tools to do what we do, it is very specialised”.